Sixteen
immigrants
arrested by
Border Patrol
in February for attempting to enter the United States illegally from
Mexico
were found to be listed in the FBI’s
terror
watchlist, according to newly released federal data.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
statistics
issued mid-March show a total of 69 noncitizens on the terror watchlist have been apprehended between ports of entry at the southern border in fiscal 2023, which began in October 2022. The FBI database includes known and suspected terrorists and can include family members or affiliates of such people.
The 16 possible terrorists stopped in February were among 128,877 total illegal immigrants caught at the southern border. One additional person arrested by Border Patrol occurred at the Canadian border. Other immigrants who illegally crossed but got away are not included in this figure.
‘ZOMBIE’ DRUG OF HORSE TRANQUILIZER-LACED FENTANYL RAVAGES US AND ALARMS US OFFICIALS
The February number is double the average of eight that border officials caught in an average month in 2022. Last year,
nearly 100
people on the watchlist were among the 2.2 million illegal immigrants apprehended at the border.
The 98 in 2022 was a major spike from 0 in 2019, when the U.S. border faced a smaller-scale humanitarian and national security crisis.
CBP does not disclose the nationalities of immigrants who are a match for the terror watchlist.
Last August, the Washington Examiner obtained unpublished data from the Department of Homeland Security that showed how the government internally tracked where immigrants with terror ties had traveled from.
That data revealed that in the first six months of 2022, 25 of the 27 known or suspected terrorists arrested by Border Patrol were citizens of Colombia, not countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, where terrorist groups al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others are based.
Immigration analyst Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute in Washington noted at the time that some Colombians on the watchlist might not be true terror threats.
“It’s … possible that the individual Colombians apprehended were affiliated with FARC or the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, which have since been delisted as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the State Department, but their individual names are still in the TSDS and haven’t been purged,” Nowrasteh said.
The Terrorist Screening Dataset is the government database that lists people believed to be or definitively involved with terrorist groups, as well as people affiliated with known or suspected terrorists. The State Department
lists
two Colombian groups as foreign terrorist organizations: the Segunda Marquetalia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army, or FARC-EP.
The spike in the number of terrorist-related arrests over the past two years coincides with a dramatic demographic
change
in immigrants trying to enter the U.S. by way of the southern border.
CBP data going back to 2007 show that Mexicans made up 90% of all arrests that year. By 2019, immigrants from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras made up more than 70% of all arrests. Last year, immigrants from countries outside Mexico and the Northern Triangle made up 1.1 million of the total 3.4 million apprehensions, or 32%, according to CBP
data
.
The Border Patrol numbers from the southern border do not include noncitizens arrested illegally entering between ports of entry on the Canadian border or coastal regions. They also do not include terror watchlist people who were denied entry at the land, air, and sea ports of entry.
At the ports of entry, 214 noncitizens who sought admission were determined to be on the FBI list, with the large majority, 176, of incursions at ports along the northern border, in fiscal 2023.
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FBI Director Christopher Wray
testified
before the Senate in August 2022 that although there was no “imminent threat from a foreign terrorist organization on the border at the moment,” terrorists were looking for any vulnerability to “exploit.”
Up to half of Border Patrol agents were pulled from the field to process and transport the high volume of illegal immigrants crossing the border over the past two years.
